The Nazi Holocaust

by Ronnie Landau

Book Overview

The Nazi Holocaust is an important breakthrough in the struggle to understand this shattering event. By shunning simplistic explanations, Landau seeks to mediate between the vast, often unapproachable subject and the reader who wrestles with its meaning. Locating the Holocaust within a number of different contexts--Jewish history, German history, genocide in the modern age, and the larger story of human bigotry and the triumph of ideology over...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630525
• ISBN13: 9781566630528
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

not as comprehensive as its title might imply

but still essential. i wouldn't want to examine it as a narrative; landau's essentially offering facts and tying them together chronologically- but as a one-volume overview of the Holocaust, it works wonderfully- and tragically. by detaching the stories from the context of the German political environment of the time, landau underscores exactly how systemic the process was. one day, the Jews lost their bench-sitting privileges; the next, they lost their radios; the next, they lost their ability to own businesses; and on and on, until the reader is brought to the camps, there to meet the horrors firsthand and to see, straightforwardly and without pretense, the nature of the operations. this is not the book to pick up if you're looking for a readable holocaust summary. but does such an event warrant a summary? i can't think of one right now, save, perhaps, "the destruction of the european jews." but that's hardly "readable." my best bet for Holocaust study? read this for an overview, along with "the destruction..."; read anne frank, of course, and etty hillesum for the personal experience- and fit victor klemperer into the mix if you have time; he gives a sense of what was being experienced by a fully-formed adult during that time; read "the theory and practice of hell" for the technical aspects of the camps; read "why did the heavens not darken?" (flawed yet worthy) for a modern philosophical consideration of the whole dark mass, along with, of course, "hitler's willing executioners" (again, flawed, and much more insidiously so) and its refutation, "a nation on trial"; read "the nazis- a pictorial history" for photos that will remind you that this happened on days much like this one; and read "truth and lamentation", if it's still available, for a shot at what those in the ghettos and the slums and the camps were doing while they weren't being slaughtered. these titles all imply that this subject can't be gently summed up. which is the way it should be.